


Hundreds Of Stories

by Merixcil



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Cheating, Eliza Schuyler deserved better, F/M, Gen, Mentions of Slavery, Not quite an AU, Regrets, Retreading Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 07:26:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10079426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: They say your life flashes before your eyes when you are about to die. Alexander Hamilton is no different.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the song 'Hundreds of Stories' from In The Heights

If he could grow roots, now would be the time. Thick, living, ever green. Study beyond sturdy.

Once upon a time there had been a hurricane. It tore houses from their foundations, decimated crops and the next day he had looked around the town and realised that the world would never be the same. Never. Not today, not tomorrow. Something would always be missing, you can’t hold on forever.

On that morning there had still been trees standing. Not all of them, they twisted in the wind and died like so many bodies bloating in the ocean, pulling the earth up with them where they fell. The world had smelt like death that day, but there had still been a few trees standing. Native palms too strong to topple, and for all he knew they were still there. Growing, standing strong in the face of hurricanes, they couldn’t grow so tall without weathering a few storms. So he thinks about roots and how deep they have to grow before you become invincible. He thinks about Philip, about Eliza. There is another version of this story where that is enough.

Nothing will ever be enough.

The sun glares across the horizon, meeting him face to face. It was the same sun that rose the morning after a hurricane to gaze upon the dead, and perhaps today it will relive a small part of that carnage, watching as the momentum of the Earth carries the dead out to sea.

Pistol in hand. There is another version of this story where he casts it aside before the proceedings begin. Better yet, Burr casts his pistol aside first and it will be no great injury to his honour to follow suit. Maybe one of them will be a little more forgiving in negotiations, or their seconds will be better at finding a balance between what the two of them want. The theory seems so easy, all that need happen is a moment of weakness, or compassion.

And still the sun bears down on him, trying to break his line of sight. He tries not to think about Eliza’s eyes, lids still heavy with sleep that morning. When she asked him to come back to bed and he could have said yes. It’s such an easy word, he manages so much more on a daily basis and yet in that moment he couldn’t find the time to say three letters, one syllable. He could still be asleep, wrapped in her warm embrace. God, he can’t wait to see her again. It’s almost enough to make him think he shouldn’t have left at all.

He should have bitten his tongue, or maybe that’s too fanciful a story for any lifetime. Still, there is a version of this story where he looked above the bridge of his nose to meet Burr face to face amid the paper and ink of so many letters. In that tale reconciliation is so much more than a barely salvageable dream, it is inevitable. Bright, bold. Yes is easy and sorry is so so hard, you have to have a softer tongue than him to let it out that quickly. He should have let himself become liquid, dashing back across his scurrilous remarks and sly insults like the retreating tide.

Burr may still have let him have it, but at least he could say it wasn’t on his own head after that. Like Philip, he could have come to Weehawken with a straight back and wide, shining eyes.

God, he doesn’t want to think about Philip. Not now. Lest he close his eyes and see his son standing before him, unable to tell if the image was a trick of the sun’s glare or a blessing from the almighty. Philip should have had his own story, in this one he is just one of many threads that got cut off before they could reach their natural conclusion.

Meanwhile in Washington City, whole new stories that he had failed to see as viable or believable until it was too late are coming to life. There’s another version of this story where he sat back and didn’t try to meddle with an election, where he let the nation make it’s own choice. Fat chance. You don’t watch your son, your mother, one of your great loves, die without developing an instinct for protection. He can hardly claim to be all knowing but he thinks he knows a thing or two about political power, and he knows that in Jefferson’s hands it is safer than in Burr’s. Burr would have sold off his influence to the highest bidder and made a mockery of the Presidency. There is another version of this story where he is doing just that, and it is Jefferson who stands across the clearing, cleaning his pistol.

Perhaps he made a mistake. Few things in life can be as wonderful as the idea of taking Thomas Jefferson out of this world for good. Not that it matters, the man is no doubt smart enough to stay out of affairs of honour, seeing as he has so little of the stuff to spare. A momentary lapse in concentration, it’s not that serious. There is another version of this story where John Adams got the support he deserved before the people went to the polls and Jefferson was never so much as a consideration in the eyes of the nation. That really wouldn’t have been so bad.

He hadn’t exactly been in opposition with Adams, which is not to say that he liked the man. Politics, it turns out, is a series of compromises interspersed with a great lowering of horns as you ready yourself to charge. He never much minded butting people out of the way for his own sake, he has come to learn it does not go far towards securing your place in people’s confidence. They miss the loyalty, the dedication to his own personal brand of the dream. All they see is an opportunist.

Or maybe he’s coming at this from the wrong angle. Maybe Washington wasn’t all that great or strong, despite the most fiercely held beliefs of the nation, and perhaps he crumbled where better men would have stood their ground. Where does that leave loyalty, or dreams?

Sometimes he dreams of long white beaches and the hacking of axes laying waste to the jungle. There was never any space for the forest, only sugar could grow. The island was like one great field interspersed with towns, trying to avert your eyes from the slaves that came through, lest you see the darkest aspects of your soul reflected back at you. He used to hold his breath, feel the wrongness of their subservience pounding on his heart, but he never spoke a word against it. Not then.

If only there had been time and courage, another version of this story perhaps. He won’t think too deeply on it.

So maybe Adams could have stayed, in the version of the story where the faults of his presidency are not his exclusive failure. He did not draft the Alien Act, nor the Sedition Act. He did not see them pushed through, not John Adams. But he was insecure and dislikeable, that hadn’t helped. In many ways, destroying his reputation had seemed so easy that it would have been remiss not to have a hand in it.    

And in the end, Adams signed on the dotted line, and those acts of government that had been given legs by people in other corners of American power became law. He had no control, but he never fought back.

Oh forget Adams, he’s not so worried about past presidents. Nothing would really be any different unless he had managed to stay his hand when the inspectors came calling. He shouldn’t have published that paper, he shouldn’t have broken Eliza’s heart.

Eliza. He closes his eyes, breathes carefully. She’s probably still asleep. There’s another version of this story where she got everything she deserved rather than whatever he saw fit to give her. In that story there were no wasted years, waiting for her to swallow her pride along with her grief and come rushing back to his arms. He worries sometimes that she had nowhere else to go to, that she would just as easily have stayed rooted to the spot if not for social propriety. She never did want to rock the boat, his dear Eliza. The most outspoken she ever became was when she was setting fire to their marriage and watching it burn in the privacy of her own living room.

 _Her_ living room, he’ll give her that. She can take the house, take the kids, just so long as in every version of this story she takes him back. The real trick would have been never giving her the chance to leave in the first place, but he’s almost certain he’s not strong enough for that. If it hadn’t been Maria Reynolds, there was still John. Or the flickering light of Angelica at the edge of his vision, or the Baron, or Governor Morris, or Gilbert. God above, there had been a time when it might have been Burr, over drinks in a shady corner of New York, trying to match him up to stories he heard so long ago on an island where the wind whipped the trees into submission every summer.

There hadn’t really been summers, there would never have been anything between him and Burr. He’s pretty sure that the competing strands of the tale would not be shifted that far into each other’s orbit. He could be wrong of course, but he doesn’t like to think about it.

Or maybe it would have been Washington. Poor, dead, foolish George Washington who was a great man without been a great general, and a decent President without an interest in politics. He should have been persuaded to stay, for as long as he lived. Made America the great Empire of the west and install himself as King in all but name. That would solve the Jefferson problem, there is another version of this story where petty party squabbles aren’t so much as a momentary consideration to any of them. In that lifetime, maybe there would be enough hunger in the General’s eyes to look down at his aides and see them as blushing maids, right for the taking.

He shakes his head, not here, not now. Not while Burr and Van Ness have their heads pressed close together, while Nathaniel looks on, unable to penetrate the bubble that has formed around the rest of the world. These are the last moments that they can be assured of, for all they know they could both be dead tomorrow.

It’s not the first time he’s tried to duel his way to what he wants, it just doesn’t normally work out so well. Every other time he’s fallen back on this line of thinking the other guy has caved. Unable to bear the threat of death. He’s got to admit that it’s heavy, crushing, pushing his mind out of his body and back into a past he cannot change but could have been so different. If he had roots, if only he had roots…

If he had roots he might still be standing on a beach in the Caribbean, looking out to sea while the world falls apart around him. He doesn’t want to think about that version of the story, but he knows it’s coming.

No. instead he casts his mind back to the end of a war they were never supposed to win and the offer of offices he was never fit to hold. If he really wants to worry about everything he took from Eliza he can start there, heading out of the door and down to the Capitol while she begged him to stay. In another version of this story he stays, rooted. In another lifetime, it’s so close he can almost taste it, rushing up at him from the early years. Screeching, insistent. He got so lucky, too many times, luck won’t hold forever. Doesn’t matter how smart you are.

It’s not even worth thinking about the war, all those battles they had no right to win, the might of the crown up against their churlish dissatisfaction with systems of taxation. He can’t believe he ever cared so much, not after the bills he’s seen passed, the financial structures he’s helped to build. If he had his life all over again he wouldn’t have worried so much that he wasn’t standing on the front line, he would have been content with the blisters forming at his fingers while his pen scratched missive after missive to an uncaring congress. He would have picked his battles better, for all the fire that never went out there is so much that burns low, knowing that if it were to happen today he wouldn’t have encouraged Washington the way he did.

They fought without honour, they were insistent on it. There is a pistol at his side and the only thing preventing him from throwing it down and running home to the only good thing he has ever been able to hold on to is his honour. What a mess, where is he supposed to start unpicking the right choices from the wrong?

In another version of this story he never wrote letters to crown loyalists, he let them have their pointless devotion to the king. Perhaps he would have kept his head down, he might not have been so poor at the time, living off the kindness of strangers. He should have kept his head below the parapet, you can’t get shot like that. It can’t have been so hard to bite his tongue and let Samuel Seabury win the way.

The way some people remember it, Seabury still won. Till he died two years later. Poor sod. It shouldn’t have happened like that. None of this should have happened. Even back then he had had Burr at his shoulder, judging him for the way he spoke, the way he shouted, the way he wrote. Poor Burr, keeping every heartfelt feeling locked away where it could not hurt him, a cancer he refuses to expel. To think it would come to this.

Once upon a time there had been an island, and on the island there had been drinking holes. A teenage boy who never drank sat on the edge of conversation from the American colonies and heard the name Aaron Burr fall from their lips with wonder. A prodigy, a rich man. The teenager had wanted that life, and once he had it he wanted so much more.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Burr had said. It would have been so easy to fall in love with him on the spot, maybe that’s what happened after all, and this is just the aftermath, the jealousy. In another life.

The sun is still climbing but it is well and truly above the horizon, the inevitable can only be delayed for so much longer, the doctor sent away downstream as the seconds count paces to mark the starting point for the duel. Burr has his head bowed, muttering, praying. He hasn’t changed a bit.

Eliza prays, every day. She has done since the day he met her, though he wouldn’t know as much until they were married and under the same roof. In many ways, the act of courting was too brief to get to know a person, in another life she would have taken the time to know him better and to understand that whatever weight she tried to put on him he would always break free. Floating towards the surface of the water, bloated, no roots. That would have saved Eliza so many tears. It would have saved them the son they lost together.

No, mustn’t think about Philip, mustn’t think about him running into the office for advice and telling him to shoot towards the sky rather than run. Turns out that’s not a mistake you get to make just once, you make it again and again and again. You can’t waste your life wondering what might have been when you refuse to learn from your mistakes, but once you admit to yourself you have regrets you have to move past them, into the arena of the living world. Into the path of bullets, you weren’t listening, your feet should not be so still.

There is a life out amongst the stars where Eliza was never a consideration, where Philip was never a twinkle in either of their eyes. That, perhaps, is what stings the most. The way Angelica’s hand had tightened over his when she had realised that she would have to be the one to give him away. Sometimes he wonders what might have been if she hadn’t sized him up so quickly, if he’d listened just a little harder when Burr was explaining the rules of social interaction. That night he could have been the man he was never supposed to be, and she could have fallen into his arms. And Eliza could have found herself someone with roots, a great oak that would have swept her up in its boughs and never let her go. A palm that would have stood on the shore for fifty years or more. The idea doesn’t come to him for his sake, or Angelica’s, just for his poor wife.

The men of this family get washed out to sea. A father who crashed across the Atlantic onto an island that didn’t want him. A son who forgot his place in the world and let the tides of history dump him on whatever rock they saw fit. Another son who decided that if he could not be grounded he would become the wind and would blow the world along with him. The grandson who let the wind get ahead of him, knocking him down when he’d barely had time to learn how to walk.

He choked, he stood tall. Sometimes he forgot he had had a brother. In another version of this story he had refused to leave the island without him. If James had come with him, if only.

It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s standing in the middle of a clearing in the woods, turning his back on the sun and ready to march.  Burr is warm behind him, more and less significant than he ever should have been. With a great cry someone begins the count, all the time left to worry if he should have made a different choice along the way, or if every choice was just a hoax, a trap designed to lead him here from the day he first heard his assailant’s name dropping from the lips of men who knew more about the world than he ever thought was possible.

“One!”

It’s a pointless challenge. It’s just honour, it mattered for nothing when he was a child and here he is buying into a system that prides itself on upholding the utmost honour. They won a war without honour, he broke Eliza’s heart without honour. This doesn’t feel grand or prescient, it is a mistake he has wished on his own head in a world that will not let him out of the trap. In another version of this story he doesn’t care, he never set foot on this riverbank, he is at home, growing strong.

“Two!”

When he first met Burr he had been so full of hope, for this brand new country and this brand new friend. Looking back on the sum total of events he supposes it’s a little rich to describe them as friends. They were acquaintances, or they knew each other. It could have been so different, In another version of this stories it is Burr and not John Laurens who fills the whole where a first love is supposed to go. In another life, they don’t know each other at all.

“Three!”

The kicker will forever be the letter he sent by his own pen. He could have apologised, or talked his way around it. He always was so good at talking, he learned the value of weighted words young. And oh how his words are weighty, insistent. They don’t let up. Burr was the better lawyer but _he_ didn’t know how to close his mouth. Together they were unstoppable, it was beyond belief that they hadn’t managed to at least talk themselves to an impasse, if not a proper compromise. He rather suspects that Burr wanted it to come to this, or maybe he had grown to stagnant and needed to let the world be torn out from under him along with everything else. In another version of this story this is avoidable, they have patience, they have compassion, they have strength.

“Four!”

Sometimes he lies awake at night with the war still raging in the back of his mind. The maneuvers they flubbed, the soldiers they lost. Congress sitting like a lame duck, impotent and childish in its refusal to grant them anything. The cavalry never came and they still won, by sheer dogged repetition, by reception, by attacking the flanks of moving columns and running before anyone more threatening could put them back in their place. In another version of this story he stops before he turns to face Burr and takes the bullets out of his gun. They would say that was dishonourable or cowardly, and he would say it was the only way.  

“Five!”

The sun is up. The sun is positively glaring down at them. In another version of this story they plan everything better and the whole affair is a shot in the dark, impossible to feel guilty over.

“Six!”

Who knows when Eliza will find the note he left for her, if he’ll have time to explain himself before he passes. Or maybe he’ll live and she’ll find the letter anyway, what will she say? Will she burn it along with everything else? If he was her he’s not sure he’d want to remember himself, not when it would be so easy to let him become a stain on other people’s memory. In another version of this story the note on his dresser is the only letter he ever wished she wouldn’t have to read.

“Seven!”

It’s not that he had no faith but he has never quite worked out how to cling to it. At times God occupies every second thought and at others He is a distant concern in the rich tapestry of influences that pull at him every which way. In another version of this story his belief has been close to his heart from the moment of his birth until now. It seems impossible to be scared of what lies beyond the final closing of his eyes when he is convinced he will see Philip, Washington, Peggy, John. His mother. Everything lies beyond that belief in the magnificent, but his hands have been slipping since he recited his first psalm.

“Eight!

He could turn and apologise to Burr, and in another version of this story that’s exactly what he does. They look each other in the eye and see themselves, and everything they could never be and when they shake hands the matter is put to rest with finality. It would be simple and shameful, and the pistol is already in his hands. So he doesn’t.

“Nine!”

He worries for a moment that after everything his courage will fail him. The image of a burning ship, riding high over waves the size of mountains he will never see flashes behind his eyes. The sound of British canon fire, Jefferson’s grin, the General saying goodbye for the last time, Philip's hand going slack around his own. Storms, endless and unyielding dragging him up and out of the sand, and his roots never grow. So in another version of this story there is no need for fear, and no need to respond. But that is then and this is now and the world will not stop spinning long enough for him to grab a proper hold.

“Ten!”

There is a beach, and it is beautiful and every day is warm. Neither of his parents are dead and his father never left. James works in the town and comes home to his wife and is happy. There is a hurricane brewing on the horizon, promising dead bodies and ruined homes. Promising driftwood and dead children, a year’s worth of growth torn away by the wind. So the leaves never grow but the roots run deep, so deep that they can hold onto the sand, keep them all from slipping. They are a family and they will get through this together. They have never seen America. Scotland is a far off shore.

There is a night sky filled with stars, there is a fire burning on the beach. They eat together almost every night, they do not drink. The men at the bar speak of Vice President Aaron Burr as an afterthought. Philip plays in the sand with Angelica and Alexander but all their names are different because Eliza is a world away growing her roots with someone who will make her happy.

There are people outside this town who know his name but they are so few and far between as to not be worth mentioning. He talks and he talks and he talks and he always gets his way. No one falls with him.

There are remnants of pine trees lying in the water, there are sodden papers, there are dead livestock. He is standing on the shore, roots too deep to shift. Alexander Hamilton is alive, and that’s enough.

There is another version of this story, and it never gets told.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love! Come find me on [tumblr](http://kim--hanbins.tumblr.com/) :)


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